Abstract

This project considers repetition as both individual action and accumulated force. Thinking of repetition in this way means finding ourselves, with each repeated action, between the force of what we have done and the potential of what we can yet do. From this position, the project will, first, explore how previous repetition creates inertia toward future action. Second, it will explore the possibility of ongoing negotiation of this inertia in a way that allows some indeterminacy to exist for our future actions. The first chapter considers how it is that repetitions compress over time into habit and how this compression allows past actions to be made useful for present and future action. The chapter will challenge the understanding of habit as a static position, or place of stagnation, for the body and instead address it as a necessary process. It will account for the formation of habits as well as their effects. That our actions, reactions, and repetitions occur in a context of prescriptive forces is addressed in the second chapter, specifically through technique of ii discipline and the effects of normalization. The second chapter addresses the disciplinary techniques employed to move bodies toward a particular, recognizable form and to value bodies relative to their distance from this form, and their distance from other bodies. Through Michel Foucault and Sara Ahmed, pressures of normalization are discussed in terms of pressure on the body to align with other bodies, and extended to the example of femininity. Retaining the terms of straightness and alignment, the third chapter will consider curvature as a departure that may be painful and punishable but which has the potential to open new possibilities of action for the future. It provides a way of relating to our own inevitable repetitions and forces that seek to direct those repetitions.